Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Then I spent Tink's music class talking to a friend, who was mortified to admit she'd never read Jane Eyre.

Hmm. I may have read Jane Eyre, but I'm not sure.

This was getting embarrassing. The fact is, though, I am pretty well-read. So I looked at my book collection and my reading habits and I came to a revelation. It is this:

In my efforts to read beyond the "canon" of dead white guys, I failed to read, well, a lot of what are probably really important books by dead white guys. And the Brontë sisters.

So, inspired by my recent revelation about Pride and Prejudice and my desire to be re-admitted into the Cool Writers Club (dream on, Jacqui), I present my remedial English Lit summer project: 15 Classics in 15 Weeks. In which I am going to try to make up for 36 years of obsessing over Shakespeare, Rushdie, and Morrison, and skipping Steinbeck etal. In 15 weeks. Because a summer selling my house, finishing a triathlon, writing a novel, and raising two kids just isn't busy enough.

I need your help, though.

First: What are your top five "Everybody, Especially Someone Who Calls Herself Bookish, Should Have Read These" books? Novels, mainly, though long winded poems like Paradise Lost (which I actually have read, so there) are okay too. I'll collect suggestions all this week and then have the full list ready by Friday.

in terms of 5 Books You're Supposed To Have Read, i'll just do authors. cuz then i don't have to think as much.

1) Joyce2) EM Forster3) Dickens4) Tolstoy5) Dostoyevsky

that may be too many russians, so you can put Camus in for Dosty. and yes, neal, i realize that nabokov is not on the list. Of course, that's all European men, but wasn't that the point? If you want an American author, i'd have to go with Twain, Fitzgerald, or Hawthorne. Or Miller, if you want to be all crazy and reactionary. and read plays.

For women, you really don't have many choices outside of the Brontes and Austen, unless you want to count Louisa May Alcott. turns out that harold blooms dead white guy club is hard to get into for those of the xx persuasion.

It seems like this could really be three questions.1. what are the 5 books that I think are the true "classics" of literature (or, related but not the same, what are the "best" books)2. what are my 5 favorite books (which I'm guessing The Stand may more likely be located. I read the Stand and enjoyed it very much, but perhaps a tiny stretch to put it with the canons of literature)3. what are the 5 books I feel like I really should have read, and am a bit embarrashed as a literati to admit that I haven't read.

2. My 5 favorites (always a moving target)Rushdie- Shalimar the ClownPullman- His Dark MaterialsJoyce- UlyssesOndaatje- The English PatientMcCarthy- The Road

3. I can't believe I haven't read these...1. Faulkner (any)2. Dickens (any)3. Dosty- either Brothers K or Crime and Punishment. I've read half of each, so does that count? I mean, the dude who kills that old lady, he just moves to a different town and becomes a shock jock or a mayor, right?4. Proust5. Tolstoy- War and Peace

I like Jim D's splitting into three lists. (Which of course I embrace as a not-so-veiled way of getting to recommend more than five books.) The recovering English major in me has done my work to get over my list #3. ("My name is Liza, and I've never read Paradise Lost." "Hi, Liza.")

I've read a lot of those books for which Jacqui read the back flap to give her book report (ahem!), including the Austen/Bronte/Eliot collection. And -- really and truly -- they just don't do it for me the way my list #2 does. All of that said, and apologies for not helping with your "classics," here are my recs:1. Possession (A.S. Byatt)2. God of Small Things (A. Roy)3. Bel Canto (A. Patchett)4. Fall on Your Knees (A-M MacDonald -- had to throw a Canadian in there!)5. The Testament of Gideon Mack (J. Robertson -- and a Scot!)

I would say any Austen novel would be good - except for Mansfield Park - she dropped the ball on that one. The same goes for Dickens. If you've never read 'A Christmas Carol' it's way better than any movie or the hundreds of TV versions.

Urgh. I typed this out once already, and it didn't post. I'll try to recreate my thoughts.

I decided to pick five works that have left the most impression on me since I studied literature in college 20 years (ulp) ago.

1. "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte. Not because it's a great tragic romance, but because the deluded narrator cracks me up.2. Any collection by Jorge Luis Borges, such as "The Aleph and Other Stories." The grandaddy of the Latin American Boom, and the reason I double-majored in Spanish. And he is a dead white guy, albeit Latino and 20th century.3. "Middlemarch" by George Eliot. The dead white chicks club is not limited to Austen and the Brontes, and this novel about marriage and "settling" is one of her best. Even my engineer husband liked it when he took a one-credit course on it.4. "The Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford. It's really another novel about relationships, set around WWI. I loved the delusional narrator so much I wrote my senior thesis on it.5. "The Canterbury Tales" by Chaucer. I still remember my professor's comments about medieval romances: "Face it, people, they're all about f---ing!" Chaucer has some great satire, comedy, and poetry (especially if you manage to read it in the original).

I would've commented on "The Stand," seeing as I just finished re-reading it last week, but since Stephen King is not a dead guy I didn't think the suggestion really counted. I mean, if an author is on the bestseller list, can reading them be considered "project"-worthy? (I know, it depends. It would take a project to force me to read anything by Danielle Steele.) I was getting more of a "books I should have read in English class" vibe from this assignment.

As for "The Old Man and the Sea," it's the only Hemingway I could ever stand to read, as it's his only novel where there aren't any female characters for him to abuse.

And I would agree with Todd that any Austen save "Mansfield Park" is worthy, but I have a particular love for "Northanger Abbey" because her satire of gothic novels cracks me up.

This is a fun crew -- like it or not, Robbins, I'm in. Perhaps great reading will inspire great writing -- and spawn some sort of time warp in which everything miraculously gets done on time? Or maybe I won't sleep this summer ...

(My wife, with typical wisdom born of winters on the Great Plains, said, "Why would you do this in summer, when the weather's beautiful and you can enjoy it ... with your FAMILY!")

You said English lit -- did you mean that? No. no, you couldn't have. My list has a more international scope.

First, I should say that when I was diagnosed with incurable lymphoma one of the first things I thought was that if I had to die soon at least I didn't have to read War and Peace, which is deadly boring (I tried, really). Okay, that was ten years ago! I still haven't read it and never will (ditto Moby Dick, which I think may be even worse, except for the description of clam chowder). The point is you don't have to read the books just because they are classics.

My list has just the ones I loved. Not just dead white guys. Women too. Some are not even considered the best literature, but for me they are must-reads.

Ladies and gentlemen, that last comment was from one of my favorite people, Ronnie Fein, who is a literary and culinary genius and at whose home I spent a significant portion of my formative years. If you are looking for great books about cooking, I highly recommend her Complete Idiot's Guide to Cooking Basics, or the new Hip Kosher.

I am thrilled to see that Lizard mentioned two of the books I would recommend: Possession (A.S. Byatt) and God of Small Things (A. Roy), and A Confederacy of Dunces gets a big vote from me. There are so many more I want to suggest, but I am awful at remembering authors' names and titles.

Still, I'll give this a shot:

Wilkie Collins' Woman in White and The Moonstone -- both of these are great, really fantastic thrillers, and I much prefer them to Dickens.

Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day -- this is probably my all-time favorite book, and anyone who hasn't read it, please go out and rectify this.

Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth. So many people have never heard of this one, yet it is one of the most riveting adventure stories -- and romances -- that I have ever read.